Climate

Flash floods in Spain, Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon and the New York Halloween parade: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

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More than 200 deaths and widespread destruction in Valencia are the latest sign of danger in a warming world

The death toll from floods in Spain’s Valencia region has topped 200. A huge clean-up is under way amid desperate conditions, with severe weather warnings still in place. The storms which caused this devastation – with roads turned into muddy rivers, thousands of homes deluged and cars swept into piles – were unprecedented. The gota fría, or “cold drop”, is a regular occurrence when cold autumnal air moves over the warm Mediterranean, causing dense clouds to form. But this rain, according to the Spanish weather service, was 10 times stronger than a normal downpour.

Extreme weather in Spain, and the rest of southern Europe, is more commonly understood to mean dangerous heat, drought and wildfires. The regional government is under attack regarding the lack of sufficient warnings and there is no doubt that the severity of these floods came as a terrible shock.

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 2024 will be a year to remember. As a result of fossil fuel-driven climate change, it’s on track to be the warmest year in recorded history. This heat fueled extreme weather events across the world, with most having significant impacts on human life and infrastructure and ecosystems. 

In the United States, communities are still recovering from Hurricanes Beryl, Helene, and Milton. Each storm made history in its own right: Beryl was the earliest Category 5 storm on record in the Atlantic Ocean, Helene broke rainfall records in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and destroyed tens of mountain communities, and Milton was the second fastest intensifying storm since 1979. I wrote about the unprecedented Hurricanes Helene and Milton in an earlier blogpost. 

In other parts of the world, floods, heatwaves, wildfires, and droughts made headlines. Flooding in Central Europe this summer killed 27 people, while extreme rains in Pakistan and Afghanistan left hundreds dead and thousands of families homeless. In Brazil, the world’s largest grassland caught fire; a rapid attribution study found the fire to be 40% more intense due to climate change. And in the African Sahel, including countries like Senegal, Mali, and Niger, an extreme heatwave at the end of Ramadan would not have occurred without human-caused climate change. 

How exactly does human-caused climate change lead to more frequent and more intense extreme weather events? In this blog, I explain the science behind these extreme weather events and pinpoint how additional heat-trapping emissions in Earth’s atmosphere are responsible. 

The Earth is warming 

The burning of fossil fuels has led to an increase in pollutants such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began in the 1800s. Carbon dioxide and other pollutants trap heat in the atmosphere that would otherwise leave the Earth, acting as a sort of blanket that doesn’t allow the Earth to emit as much heat as it used to. 

This is fossil fuel-driven climate change—more heat-trapping emissions in the atmosphere results in a warming planet, with a clear warming trend observed over the last few decades (Figure 1).  

It didn’t have to be this way—the fossil fuel industry was broadly aware of the danger its products posed to the global climate since at least the mid-1960s, but chose to downplay and distort the evidence of climate change while engaging in a decades-long global campaign against climate action. And now we’re dealing with the consequences: as global warming has progressed, it has also amplified extreme weather events around the world. 

Figure 1. The global average surface temperature since 1880. Source: NOAA (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature) 

Droughts and floods are worsening

To understand why droughts and floods are worsening on a warming planet, there’s a concept in atmospheric science called the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship that we’ll need to review (bear with me here, I promise it will help!). It states that the atmosphere can hold 7% more water for every one-degree Celsius increase in temperature.  

In my previous blogpost, I explained the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship through an analogy where I envision the atmosphere as a sponge: as the temperature increases, that sponge gets bigger and bigger, allowing the atmosphere to hold more and more water. 

How does this affect the frequency and intensity of droughts and floods? If the sponge (atmosphere) can hold more water, it can hold off on raining out (imagine squeezing a sponge) longer. So, one of the reasons droughts are getting worse in some parts of world is due to the atmosphere being able to hold more water before that water leaves the atmosphere. As just one example, climate change is worsening the megadrought in the western U.S.  

For the same reason, this “sponge effect” also results in more floods—when the atmosphere finally rains out, it dumps much more rain than it used to in a given period of time. This is one of the reasons why we’re observing unprecedented heatwaves and droughts in the Sahel, while record-breaking flooding is occurring just a few thousand miles away in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  

This simple analogy works great when considering the global average change in droughts and floods. However, the change in the frequency and intensity of droughts and floods varies for different regions (Figure 2).  

For example, there is a clear increase in heavy precipitation over Europe mainly due to a warmer atmosphere being able to hold more water. Specifically, many regions in Europe will see an increase in rare heavy precipitation events, while only a slight increase in less rare events. Climate change is also causing a “precipitation whiplash” in some cases—abrupt shifts between extreme dry and extreme wet conditions in the same place, including in California.  

Figure 2. Observed changes in heavy precipitation (top) and agricultural and ecological drought (bottom). More information can be found in the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM.pdf.  

Storms are breaking records

The atmosphere is warming rapidly, yes, but it’s actually warming slower than it could be thanks to the Earth’s oceans, which are absorbing 92% of the heat from human-caused climate change. However, all this additional heat in the oceans is leading to record-breaking heat content levels, which also result in record-high ocean surface temperatures. According to the Climate Shift Index from Climate Central, record-breaking ocean surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were made 400-800 times more likely due to fossil fuel-driven climate change. 

Tropical cyclones such as hurricanes develop in the tropical oceans due to an imbalance in heat between the cool upper atmosphere and the warm ocean surface. If there is a greater imbalance in heat between these two regions, for example, a warmer ocean surface, then the hurricane can strengthen faster and become a more intense storm. 

This is exactly what happened this year with Hurricanes Beryl, Helene, and Milton. Beryl reached Category 5 strength so early in the season because it traveled over waters that were significantly warmer than usual due to climate change. Helene and Milton experienced rapid intensification in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, respectively, due to record high heat level content.  

In the future, as the world continues to warm due to additional heat-trapping emissions, storms like Beryl, Helene, and Milton will become more common. 

COP29, the L&D fund, and climate attribution

In less than two weeks, the world’s governments and organizations will convene at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s 29th annual Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan. The backdrop will be the news of 2024’s unprecedented year of extreme weather fueled by fossil fuel-caused climate change.  

At COP29, nations will decide how to fund lower-income countries’ climate adaptation and mitigation needs; my colleague, Rachel Cleetus, nicely lays out what we’ll be following this year at COP29 in this blogpost. These contributions to lower-income countries are critical as extreme weather events worsen in a warming world; we need to be sure that every country has the money necessary to adapt to climate change. 

I’ll also be following the discussion on the operationalization of the Loss and Damage fund. L&D is a term that accounts for any loss or damage, economic or non-economic, due to an extreme weather or climate event. As part of my science fellowship with the Union of Concerned Scientists, my goal is to first identify gaps in scientific literature that could help bolster and reinforce the L&D fund, and then apply a machine learning method to fill that research gap. 

Specifically, I’m interested in summarizing the current state of climate attribution science, which is a subfield of climate science that basically answers the question, “was this extreme weather or climate event more likely due to climate change?” Currently, we know that there are large gaps in climate attribution literature, for example, a lack of attribution studies in more vulnerable regions—especially in the Global South.  

Following the L&D conversation at COP could better clue us climate scientists into what those on the frontlines of the climate crisis need and help us advocate for that at COP. 

As we enter an era where years like 2024, with its unprecedented number of extreme weather events, become more common, it is up to the world’s governments at this year’s COP to resist fossil fuel industry lobbying. Governments must signal more ambitious emissions reduction commitments while agreeing on a robust climate finance goal that can, among other priorities, enable further strengthening of the world’s infrastructure to prepare for more extreme weather and climate events. 

The heat is on

• See more of Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here

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Preserving previous year’s snow for start of season can combat increasingly unpredictable winters

Before the arrival of electric fridges and freezers, people across Finland would saw a block of ice from a river or lake before the spring thaw, thickly cover it in an insulating layer of sawdust and stack it in barns, pits or ice cellars to protect produce from the warm air of the summer months.

Amid global heating and increasingly unpredictable shorter winters, a modern twist on the traditional jään säilöminen (ice preservation) technique is now being touted as a way to save Europe’s struggling low- and medium-altitude ski resorts.

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Mr. Trump and his allies envision a second term that would try to permanently eliminate protections for air, water and climate.

António Guterres says treaty will endure but urges US to remain amid reports of Republican plan to withdraw from the climate negotiating framework entirely

The world needs the US to remain in the international climate process to avoid a “crippled” Paris agreement, the UN secretary general has warned, amid fears that Donald Trump would take the country out of the accord for a second time.

António Guterres said the landmark 2015 agreement to limit global heating would endure if the US withdrew once again, but compared the prospective departure to losing a limb or organ.

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Oil moguls are big donors to Donald Trump. But so are engineering firms, hedge fund managers, shipbuilders and others that profit from fossil fuels.

Human rights watchdogs say Azerbaijan is in the midst of a vicious campaign of repression. But in global geopolitics, this energy-rich Caucasus country now has a lot of leverage.

Planned two-day protest that involves thousands of protesters poses a safety risk, police argue

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A plan by climate activists to shut down the Port of Newcastle for 50 hours has been challenged by New South Wales police who have argued in a court challenge against the protest going ahead.

Police are challenging the protest – which is planned for 19 November – in the supreme court. It’s the second time in a month police have challenged a protest in court.

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Una bodega en Noruega construida para resguardar la biodiversidad de las semillas recibió poco más de 30.000 muestras nuevas mientras crece la preocupación sobre el cambio climático y la seguridad alimentaria.

Locals in Valencia say alerts were sent out too late and deaths may have been avoided after devastating floods hit eastern Spain. The death toll from the floods has risen to more than 150, according to regional authorities and emergency services, with rescue teams still searching for missing people and working to recover the bodies of victims. 'The deaths we have now could have been avoided. If they had warned us, these deaths would not have happened,' local resident Laura Villaescusa said. 'Communications took place very late, too late'

• Spain floods death toll passes 150 as country begins three days of mourning

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Hundreds of fires are burning in New Jersey and Connecticut as the region experiences a spell of unusually warm fall weather.

As the world gathers this week for U.N. biodiversity negotiations, the U.S. hasn’t ratified a decades-old treaty to protect nature.

Decline over 2023, helped by switch to renewable power, means greenhouse gas pollution is now 37% below 1990 levels

The EU’s greenhouse gas emissions fell 8% last year, the European Environment Agency (EEA) has found, as the continent continues to close down coal-fired power plants and make more electricity from sun and wind.

The steep drop in planet-heating pollution in 2023 is close to the fall recorded in Europe at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when travel restrictions grounded planes and shuttered factories.

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As wildfires become more frequent and intense due to the climate crisis, combining the First Nations practice with western techniques is ‘crucial’

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Indigenous cultural burning practices halved the shrub cover across south-east Australia thousands of years before colonisation, reducing the intensity of bushfires, new research suggests.

The study’s authors argue that “wide-scale re-integration” of cultural burning practices, in combination with western fire management techniques, is “crucial” at a time when wildfires are becoming more frequent and intense due to the climate crisis.

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Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat is a backer of the controversial Willow oil drilling project

The administration of Alaska’s Republican governor, Mike Dunleavy, awarded at least $1m in state funds to a group claiming to represent a consensus of Indigenous support for new Arctic oil drilling, new research shows.

The group, called Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat (VAI), had just months earlier communicated with the governor’s office on ways to counter other Alaska Native groups opposed to new drilling.

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In The Loney and Starve Acre, the novelist has tapped into a rich seam of rural menace. As his new collection Barrowbeck is published, he considers how today’s fictions are haunted by climate anxiety

From the earliest pagan offerings to the metaphysical peaks of the Romantic poets, the natural world has always been a repository for our dreams and nightmares. Alienated from our fellow creatures, we see nature as something “other”, full of hidden powers, magic, threats, portents and meanings that we can’t quite fathom. And in an era of species extinction and climate emergency, the yearning to understand our place in the natural world seems more pressing now than ever given the abundance of nature writing published in the last couple of decades.

Glancing at the shelves of my local bookshop, I find the usual classics – Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, The Goshawk by TH White. There are books about specific animals: hedgehogs, wolves, moths, homing pigeons, gannets. Two volumes on owls. Five on bees. Another category comprises what we might call the nature-as-healer narrative – Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, Nature Cure by Richard Mabey, The Salt Path by Raynor Winn. Some writers have concerned themselves with the hidden things of natural world – The Secret Network of Nature by Peter Wohlleben, The Secret Life of Fungi by Aliya Whiteley. There are a great many books on rewilding, conservation and foraging.

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The annual UN climate talks, COP29, will kick off on November 11, just days after the US elections and in a year of numerous consequential elections around the world. Coming at the end of what is certain to be the hottest year on record, with millions of people experiencing devastating climate-fueled disasters and global heat-trapping emissions still rising, this COP has a sobering backdrop. Here’s what’s on the agenda at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, and why it matters.

Priorities for COP29

COP29 is being billed as the ‘Finance COP.’ That’s because countries previously agreed under the Paris Agreement that, by the end of 2024, they would decide on the new quantum of climate finance for lower-income countries, building on the previous target of $100 billion/year. While this is the top priority, other important issues will also be on the agenda.

At COP29, world leaders must deliver outcomes that respond to the acute state of the climate crisis, including:

1. An agreement on a robust climate finance goal (aka the new collective quantified goal, or NCQG, on climate finance). As I discussed in a previous blogpost, this funding is crucial for lower-income countries to be able to make a rapid clean energy transition while closing the huge energy poverty gap for millions of people without access to modern forms of energy. It is also essential for these countries’ climate adaptation needs and for addressing their loss and damage from extreme climate impacts. UCS is urging the United States and other rich countries, together with additional contributors in a position to provide funding, to commit to a collective goal of $1 trillion annually starting in 2025. This could be met from a variety of sources—including pollution fees on fossil fuel companies, the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies, and wealth taxes on the richest people. The true need is in the trillions, and it’s only just that richer countries, which are most responsible for heat-trapping emissions, take the lead by paying their fair share. It’s time to also expand the contributor base to include oil-rich countries in the Middle East, Singapore and China, among others. This funding must come primarily in the form of grants or very low-interest loans to avoid exacerbating the debt burden in lower-income nations. Reforming the international multilateral lending architecture to be fairer and more aligned with climate and sustainable development objectives is also critical.
   
2. A strong signal that nations will submit more ambitious emission reduction commitments (aka nationally determined contributions, or NDCs) by February 2025. Numerous scientific reports (see below) show that nations are falling far short of what is needed to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. The next round of NDCs is due by February, and it will be very important for major emitting nations—including the U.S., EU member states, and China—to significantly ratchet up their targets. UCS is advocating for the US to commit to cutting its emissions at least 70% below 2005 levels by 2035, a level that can be met if we implement additional strong policies (beyond the Inflation Reduction Act and other existing federal and state policies) to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy and the phase out of fossil fuels. Cutting emissions across all sectors and all heat-trapping gases is crucial. Unfortunately, we are currently not even on track to meet our 2030 goal of cutting emissions by 50-52% below 2005 levels, and the choices made by the next administration will make a big difference in our chances of getting there.
   
3. An agreement to adequately resource the UN Loss and Damage Fund and quickly disburse funds to frontline communities. Last year on the opening day of COP28, nations agreed to launch the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, a hard-won historic achievement, but one that came with paltry initial pledges. Since then, the World Bank has taken on the role of hosting the fund and serving as its trustee on an interim basis for four years. Now, what’s desperately needed are new funding commitments from countries to help meet the significant and growing needs as the climate crisis worsens. As just one example, earlier this year, heavy rainfall and flooding across Sudan, Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon, worsened by climate change, killed more than 2,000 people and displaced millions. Climate vulnerable countries need funding to start flowing quickly. The Loss and Damage Fund should also include a community access window providing directly accessible small grants for communities, local civil society organizations, Indigenous Peoples and groups facing marginalization. At COP29, nations—including the United States—must make substantive new pledges to the Fund, and these commitments should also be reflected as part of the overall NCQG negotiations.   
   
4. Clear follow-through on last year’s agreement transition away from fossil fuels. At COP28, as part of the outcome of the first Global Stocktake, countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels including accelerating action in this critical decade, as well as to triple renewable energy capacity globally and doubling the global average annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030. Despite important gains in renewable energy, there is still more progress needed and fossil fuels continue to expand at odds with this agreement.
   
5. Progress on support for climate adaptation. Adaptation has received far less attention and funding than climate mitigation efforts, even as climate impacts rapidly worsen. A 2023 UN report estimates that the adaptation finance gap is about $ 194-366 billion per year. For many lower-income nations facing punishing climate impacts, this lack of support is increasingly untenable and undermining trust in the global climate regime. Under the NCQG agreement, climate finance for adaptation must be on par with mitigation. At COP28, nations reached agreement on a framework for a Global Goal on Adaptation, but there is much more needed to help implement this aspirational framework including funding, technical assistance, risk and vulnerability assessments, and clear metrics for progress.

Scientific reports sound the alarm (again)

Ahead of COP29, a series of recent scientific reports signal how far off track the world is in meeting its climate goals and the harsh toll of impacts on people—but also point the path to necessary actions that policymakers must secure. These include:

1. IEA’s World Energy Outlook—which shows an incredible growth in renewable energy—especially solar power—and yet a rapidly narrowing window to cut emissions fast enough to reach net zero by mid-century, and the risk of an up to 2.4°C increase in global average temperatures above pre-industrial levels.
   
2. UNEP’s 2024 Emissions Gap Report—which shows that nations’ collective emissions reductions are falling far short of what’s needed, putting the world at risk of a temperature increase of 2.6-3.1°C above pre-industrial levels, and underscoring how world leaders are failing their people.
   
3. The 2024 NDC Synthesis Report—which shows, as UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said, “current national climate plans fall miles short of what’s needed.” Even if fully implemented, they would put the world on track for a temperature increase of 2.1 to    2.8 °C this century.
   
4. WMO’s latest GHG Bulletin—which shows that heat-trapping emissions surged to record levels in 2023, with the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 reaching 420ppm, a level never previously experienced by humans.
   
5. The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate change—which highlights the stark impacts of climate extremes on human health and the economy, including that heat exposure has led to the loss of 512 billion potential labor hours in 2023, worth $835 billion in potential income losses. Countries ranked low and medium on the Human Development Index faced the worst impacts.

What happens at home matters for the world

My colleagues and I will be on the ground in Baku, closely tracking the climate negotiations and pushing for bold, fair outcomes. UCS, working together with a broad coalition of global civil society partners, participates at COP to help ensure that science and justice are represented in these negotiations and that policymakers hear loud and clear what people need them to do. Of course, what happens back home in countries, the policies that are implemented (or not implemented), will make all the difference in whether nations live up to global climate agreements.

UCS is also working hard at home in the United States, seeking greater ambition in clean energy deployment and a phaseout of fossil fuels, together with investments in climate resilience. And we’re advocating for the US to also live up to its global responsibilities to contribute a fair share of climate finance for low- and middle-income countries.

Unfortunately, climate policy spaces—both domestic and international—are increasingly under siege from fossil fuel interests trying to delay or block progress or secure loopholes that would allow them to continue their business-as-usual practices, expanding fossil fuel production and raking in profits while the climate crisis worsens. Policymakers and courts must hold them to account and dismantle their hold over our energy choices and our climate future. Their influence at COP must also be thwarted.

The next couple of weeks in Baku will undoubtedly be intense. We’ll share more as the negotiations unfold, so please stay tuned.

The vote, in a sunny state with huge solar potential, reflects a growing nationwide fight over America’s energy transition.